There is an important asymmetry between the status quo and all alternatives. The status quo exists. You are walking around in it, seeing it close up, experiencing it. Any questions you may have about the reality around you can be answered by investigating it, and that investigation may turn up things you did not know, and did not know you did not know.
Alternatives, however, are imaginary. They’re something made up in your head. As such, they do not have the tangibility — literally — of reality. They do not have the inexhaustibility of reality. You cannot discover things about them that you did not put into them. Outside of mathematics, applying reasoning to an imagined scenario is a poor guide to how it would work out if it were actually created. You don’t know what you don’t know about how it would work, and you have no way of discovering.
Or in brief, Status Quo Bias Fallacy.
I wouldn’t see any compelling reason to induce in myself the desire to have sex.
That might only be true up until having the actual experience. Then you would be in a position to say which state of affairs you actually prefer.
Hi, thanks for the thoughtful reply. It seems that you are denying the following assumption:
Setting aside the costs of making changes, if a person should not switch from SOA1 to SOA2, then a person should switch from SOA2 to SOA1.
It may be true that a person should not switch from either to the other, because of uncertainty about the other. That is an important observation. But is there that much uncertainty in this case? I can imagine what it would be like to be asexual. Conversely, if I were asexual, by listening to the experiences of others, I could imagine what it would be like to be sexual (not asexual). Is not knowing exactly how it would feel so important?
If I were blind, and there were a new technology that made me permanently sighted, I would gladly use this technology, despite not knowing what it would be like to see. In particular, I should not make myself go blind. (If it is uncertainty about the technology/drug that is the problem, then I may be inclined to agree, though I consider this part of the cost of switching, and not the SOA itself: my attempt to switch might not lead to the SOA which I intended).
In any case, we can amend the thought experiment by supposing that I wake up tomorrow asexual, and must ask my doctor to restore my sexuality. Would I do it? Here, I have direct experience of both being sexual and asexual, so there is not much uncertainty. I think I would shrug my shoulders and move on, happy to have one fewer desire to satisfy.
My point is that I never opted in to sexuality. It is well-known that you can make people do something, like save for retirement, simply by making it the default to “opt in”; they often won’t bother to opt out. But these people are irrational: it is rational not to opt out only if you would have opted in. I would not have opted in to sexuality, and therefore, I should opt out.
You’re still comparing a real situation with an imagined one. For such a large aspect of one’s life, I do not think it possible to have such assurance that one can imagine the hypothetical situation well enough. Whatever you decide, you’re taking a leap in the dark. This is not to say that you shouldn’t take that leap, just to say that that is what you would be doing. You won’t know what the other side is really (literally! really) like until you’re there, and then there’s no going back. (As I understand it, and my understanding may be out of date, the sort of drugs you are considering have permanent effects from the outset. Even a small step down that road cannot be taken back.)
Even in the case of blindness, I have read of a case where sight was restored to someone blind from birth, who ended up very dissatisfied. Because if you’ve never seen, it takes a long time to make any sense of the restored sense. Not to the point of putting his eyes out again, I think, but there was no “happily ever after”.
There is an important asymmetry between the status quo and all alternatives. The status quo exists. You are walking around in it, seeing it close up, experiencing it. Any questions you may have about the reality around you can be answered by investigating it, and that investigation may turn up things you did not know, and did not know you did not know.
Alternatives, however, are imaginary. They’re something made up in your head. As such, they do not have the tangibility — literally — of reality. They do not have the inexhaustibility of reality. You cannot discover things about them that you did not put into them. Outside of mathematics, applying reasoning to an imagined scenario is a poor guide to how it would work out if it were actually created. You don’t know what you don’t know about how it would work, and you have no way of discovering.
Or in brief, Status Quo Bias Fallacy.
That might only be true up until having the actual experience. Then you would be in a position to say which state of affairs you actually prefer.
ETA: See also.
Nobody is ever “rationally required” to do anything. [Imagine Soyboy vs. Chad meme here.]
Hi, thanks for the thoughtful reply. It seems that you are denying the following assumption:
Setting aside the costs of making changes, if a person should not switch from SOA1 to SOA2, then a person should switch from SOA2 to SOA1.
It may be true that a person should not switch from either to the other, because of uncertainty about the other. That is an important observation. But is there that much uncertainty in this case? I can imagine what it would be like to be asexual. Conversely, if I were asexual, by listening to the experiences of others, I could imagine what it would be like to be sexual (not asexual). Is not knowing exactly how it would feel so important?
If I were blind, and there were a new technology that made me permanently sighted, I would gladly use this technology, despite not knowing what it would be like to see. In particular, I should not make myself go blind. (If it is uncertainty about the technology/drug that is the problem, then I may be inclined to agree, though I consider this part of the cost of switching, and not the SOA itself: my attempt to switch might not lead to the SOA which I intended).
In any case, we can amend the thought experiment by supposing that I wake up tomorrow asexual, and must ask my doctor to restore my sexuality. Would I do it? Here, I have direct experience of both being sexual and asexual, so there is not much uncertainty. I think I would shrug my shoulders and move on, happy to have one fewer desire to satisfy.
My point is that I never opted in to sexuality. It is well-known that you can make people do something, like save for retirement, simply by making it the default to “opt in”; they often won’t bother to opt out. But these people are irrational: it is rational not to opt out only if you would have opted in. I would not have opted in to sexuality, and therefore, I should opt out.
You’re still comparing a real situation with an imagined one. For such a large aspect of one’s life, I do not think it possible to have such assurance that one can imagine the hypothetical situation well enough. Whatever you decide, you’re taking a leap in the dark. This is not to say that you shouldn’t take that leap, just to say that that is what you would be doing. You won’t know what the other side is really (literally! really) like until you’re there, and then there’s no going back. (As I understand it, and my understanding may be out of date, the sort of drugs you are considering have permanent effects from the outset. Even a small step down that road cannot be taken back.)
Even in the case of blindness, I have read of a case where sight was restored to someone blind from birth, who ended up very dissatisfied. Because if you’ve never seen, it takes a long time to make any sense of the restored sense. Not to the point of putting his eyes out again, I think, but there was no “happily ever after”.
But then, there never is.